The strands of Catholic Thought

I have a long-form essay, The Strands of Catholic Thought, now available here. It responds to (among other things) an analogy proposed by the Remnant last year (subsequently taken up, for the hat-trick, by Marquette’s Daniel Maguire and Fr. Dwight Longenecker). The Remnant‘s notion was that a “rough parallel” for our current divisions (in which there are three distinct Catholic factions, those who reject the “Vatican II project,” those who accept it, and those who accept the text of the council but reject what was done after it in the name of its “spirit”) might be “the division of Judaism into Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox branches.” Finding this powerful, I propose that we adopt that taxonomy and embrace the idea that the three “strands” of Catholic thought since the Council might be usefully denominated “Reform Catholicism,” “Conservative Catholicism,” and “Orthodox Catholicism.”

On November 18th, 2015, the feast of Pope St. Martin I: “Glorious definer of the Orthodox Faith … sacred chief of divine dogmas, unstained by error … true reprover of heresy … foundation of bishops, pillar of the Orthodox faith, teacher of religion…. Thou didst adorn the divine see of Peter, and since from this divine Rock, thou didst immovably defend the Church, so now thou art glorified with him.”